Category: Pop. Genetics

Summary: Testing whether intermediate catastrophe persistence creates the strongest dormancy rescue effect in a branching population under clustered shocks.

Populations facing repeated environmental catastrophes can sometimes survive by placing part of the population into a reversible dormant state. This experiment asks whether the timing structure of those catastrophes creates a sweet spot where dormancy helps most: too little temporal memory behaves like isolated shocks, while too much persistence creates long damaging runs that overwhelm the rescue mechanism.

The simulation runs repeated branching processes in random environments with reversible dormancy and varying catastrophe persistence. It compares outcomes across many independent trials, looking for a nonmonotone rescue window produced by temporal matching between clustered shocks and delayed reactivation from the seed bank.

That interaction is interesting because branching, catastrophes, and dormancy are often studied separately. Here the experiment isolates how environmental memory changes the value of keeping a reserve population in dormancy.

Method: Repeated stochastic branching-process simulations with catastrophe-memory dynamics and reversible dormancy, run until the time budget is exhausted.

What is measured: Survival and rescue probabilities, dependence on catastrophe persistence, dormancy benefit, and finite-time population outcomes.